ACS1001: Moderns Elective Reading List

All ACS 1001 syllabuses must include at least two (2) texts from the list of authors/texts listed below. The list is organized according to broad chronological periods in modernity.

16th Century

Author

Suggested texts

Erasmus

Luther

Machiavelli

The Prince

Montaigne

Essays

More

Utopia

Pico della Mirandola

On the Dignity of Man

17th Century

Author

Suggested texts

Bacon

From The New Organon: "The Four Idols"

Cervantes

Don Quixote

Hobbes

Leviathan

Locke

Second Treatise

Milton

Paradise Lost

Moliere

Tartuffe, the Misanthrope

Pascal

Pensées

Swift

Gulliver’s Travels

18th Century

Author

Suggested texts

American Founders

Franklin, Autobiography

Paine, Common Sense

Madison, et al. Federalist Papers

Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Jane Austen

Pride and Prejudice

Kant

"What is Enlightenment?"

Voltaire

Candide

Rousseau

Confessions, Emile, First Discourse

Hume

Smith

Theory of Moral Sentiments, Wealth of Nations

Wollstonecraft

Vindication of the Rights of Woman

19th Century

Author

Suggested texts

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

Kate Chopin

The Awakening

Charles Darwin

Charles Dickens

Emily Dickinson

Dostoevsky

Notes from Underground

Frederick Douglass

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Marx and Engels

Communist Manifesto

Goethe

Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust

Herman Melville

John Stuart Mill

On Liberty

John Henry Newman

Friedrich Nietzsche

Romantic Poets

Poems by Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, or Keats

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

Harriett Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

Transcendentalists

Writings by Emerson or Thoreau

Tolstoy

Death of Ivan Ilyich

Tocqueville

Democracy in America

Twain

20th and 21st Century

Author

Suggested texts

Chinua Achebe

Things Fall Apart

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot (play)

Wendell Berry

"Fidelity," Hannah Coulter, "Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer"

Albert Camus

The Plague, The Just Assassins (play)

Simone De Beauvoir

Introduction to The Second Sex

W.E.B. DuBois

The Souls of Black Folk

Shusako Endo

Silence

Sigmund Freud

Civilization and its Discontents

Gandhi

Zora Neale Hurston

Their Eyes were Watching God

James Joyce

"The Dead"

Kafka

Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cormac McCarthy

The Sunset Limited (radio play), No Country for Old Men

Toni Morrison

Beloved, Paradise, Home

Marilynne Robinson

Gilead, "The Human Spirit and the Good Society"

Solzhenitsyn

Simone Weil

Max Weber

The "Protestant Ethic" and the Spirit of Capitalism

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own, "Professions for Women," "On Being Ill," "The Death of the Moth"

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